Tagged with “social networks”
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Julia Hobsbawm investigates the idea that we are all connected by only six links.

Is everyone in the world really connected by only six links?

A famous experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s claimed that it took on average only six steps for a message to pass between two strangers in America. Since then the idea has become part of popular culture. But is it true? And if so, does it matter?
Julia Hobsbawm investigates how social networks work, whether we should all pay more attention to our network connections, and whether governments can use social networks to promote - for instance - messages about health. Maybe, she discovers, it’s not the six degrees of separation that matter, but the three degrees of influence.

The web is founded on open, decentralised principles. This means anyone can build a site that can link to any other, without any need for proprietary technology. No one owns e-mail, usenet or http, but social services like Facebook and Twitter are—for the most part—silo’d businesses with their own networks and proprietary APIs. You can join them together in code, but they’re not in any way ‘interoperable’.

This panel will explore why large and centralized seems to dominate, whether it’s a bug or a feature. We’ll take a critical eye at new attempts at building distributed social web products like Diaspora. We won’t be focusing on the technical specifications as much as the end user experience and the business models that could support them. If a distributed service wouldn’t be fun, easy to use or profitable, then is there really any point in building one…?

Evan Prodromou, CTO, StatusNet Inc

Founder and creator of the StatusNet open source social platform, Evan is the co-chair of the W3C’s working group on federated social web technologies.

They say you only get one chance at a first impression, but logically speaking, you only get one chance at a second impression too. Google’s earlier forays into social networking haven’t been well received, but Google’s newest is making a very good impression indeed. Analysts, journalists, and the public at large all seem to like Google+. That is, those that can get on—the service is still in an invitation-only mode.
The software isn’t perfect—for example, as my guest last week, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, pointed out, Google’s +1 button—more or less the equivalent of the Facebook “Like” button—doesn’t sync up with Google+.
People are looking for other comparisons to Facebook as well, but surely that misses the point. This isn’t iPhone vs. Android and who has the faster processor or more pixels or a bigger app store. Google and Facebook have very different philosophies.
Google wants you to use the whole Web. The more you do, the more you need its search engine and YouTube and Blogger and Picassa and all its other sites and the ads they show you. Facebook, on the other hand, wants you to use, well, Facebook.
In short, Google wants to play off its superior knowledge of the world and how you fit into it. Facebook wants to play off its superior knowledge of you, and how everyone else fits into your world.
This is the clash we tried to lay out for you in last month’s special report on social networking. That was before even this initial beta release of Google+. Now that we’ve seen the real thing, we have some questions.
And who better to answer them than Joseph Smarr? He’s a software engineer at Google who helped design and code Google+. Previously, he was the chief technology officer for Plaxo, which bills itself as the “smart address book.” He joins us by phone from Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif.

Rory Cellan-Jones looks at the social networking sites of the future and asks where the phenomenon is heading. New sites are springing up all the time. The future of social networking could lie in localised sites geared towards specific interests, in limiting your online circle to your closest friends, or in sites that allow users to keep control of their personal information. Finally, Rory returns to the social networking pioneers of the 70s and 80s. How do the hippies and hackers who created the first social networks think their revolution has turned out? Part 3 of 3.

In the next few years, the most successful social media experiences will be the ones that understand how our offline and online worlds connect and interact. But our tools are still crude. The good news is that despite the complexity involved in understanding human relationships, we can study offline and online communication and create design principles to support what we find. In his presentation, Paul Adams speaks about what he has learned from over two years of research into people’s online and offline relationships.

From laughter epidemics to suicide cascades to the socially contagious spread of obesity, I present intriguing evidence to show that our real life social networks drive and shape virtually every aspect of our lives. How we feel, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on what others around us—even those distantly connected to us—are doing, thinking, and feeling. I show that these connections have an ancient evolutionary past, and describe how this will affect our new life as technology moves our social networks online.

The notion of the self-determining, self-directed individual is rapidly losing favour as we discover ever more about the way humans operate, behave, and make decisions in social contexts.

Social scientist Nicholas A. Christakis visits the RSA to explain how our social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behaviour, politics, and so much more. It transpires that your colleague’s husband’s sister can make you fat, even if you don’t know her. And a happy friend is more relevant to your happiness than a bigger income. Our connections - our friends, their friends, and even their friends’ friends - have an astonishing power to influence everything from what we eat to who we vote for. And we, in turn, influence others. Our actions can change the behaviours, the beliefs, and even the basic health of people we’ve never met.

In showing how we are all unavoidably and inextricably connected, Christakis presents a picture of an unknowingly collaborative society, and what we can do to best utilise the power of these networks.

Gavin Bell’s new book, Building Social Web Applications, synthesizes a wealth of practical knowledge gleaned from his own long career as a web developer and from interviews with fellow practitioners. In this conversation he reviews the key principles and patterns that define what we today call the social web but will soon simply refer to as the web.

How can your friends — and your friends’ friends — affect you? We’ll talk with Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, two researchers exploring social networks and how they affect our health and behavior. In their new book ‘Connected,’ the pair describe research into how social networks tie into obesity, smoking, voting behavior, happiness, and more.